Apart from updating and planning with Ethan, Jimmy and Dawn spent a lot of time just visiting with him. The company was welcome.

‘Ethan, what’s that buzzing sound I hear all the time? Do you hear it, or is it something to do with our end of the connection?’ Dawn asked, early in the conversations.

‘No, it’s Eldon tormenting me. He thinks the buzz will drive me crazy at some point. He’s reduced my oxygen supply too’.

‘You’re kidding?’

‘Nope’.

‘I’ll see if Alicia can do anything about that adjusting those metrics.

‘How are you two communicating?’ Ethan asked.

‘Messaging. Encrypted of course. The messages disappear when you mark them read’.

‘Make sure she knows I’m okay. I don’t want any heroics from her. If there’s a risk of getting caught, don’t do anything for me. I’m fine.

Dawn paused, ‘What happened to you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve changed somehow since you’ve been away. Is there something worse Eldon did that you’re not telling us about?’

‘No, what I told you, is what happened. He wants to keep me relatively healthy until he conquers the world. I don’t know why’.

‘But you are different Ethan. Something has changed in you.’

‘Yeah, you’re right. I did go through something in here. I had to take a closer look at myself and how I lived my life. Acknowledge how, at the end of it all, I had not lived a good life, and I saw no value in me as a person. I didn’t measure up to my own expectations of the person I could be. It’s a terrible realization. It’s the only reason we’re here, in the end.

‘My life had been such a colossal failure, it was fairly simple to create the dividing line between what went wrong. To be of value, I had to leave that side of me that was for a lack of words, evil. I had to become an entirely different person, and set my past to the side, and move forward with my life. I had to agree to this with myself. Still, the deeds of my past haunted me. It was difficult to come to this agreement. It was hard to set aside my sins, especially what I did to Leita. I lived with the guilt of those sins every moment of every day for the first few months of captivity.

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

‘Confinement will do that to you. For some reason, I didn’t care if I lived or died. Eldon didn’t worry me at all. I knew what I was getting myself into. That left all my time to spend thinking about Leita. My actions are still so vivid in my mind. My focus wasn’t on the consequences this act brought to me. It destroyed my life. My focus was on the consequences my act brought to Leita. How I stopped her life in it’s tracks, and the lose to her in everything she experienced from that moment on. The full richness of life was gone. These consequences ran over and over and over again in my mind, and I had nowhere to go, but to face them.

‘One day, my mind just snapped. I couldn’t live with myself anymore, and I couldn’t kill myself either. I snapped. I broke in two. I became separate from my old self, and set it and my sin’s to the side, and I became a very good person. Not one I can forgive without condition, but one I can live with by just being good. Living the rest of my life with values, beliefs, and acts of kindness. This is my only salvation.

‘As a result of my snapping, something new has come into my life. It’s a heightened awareness regarding everything. It’s like I’ve gained a sense, but it’s really a new perspective.

‘I took command over my thoughts. When you’re in isolation, all you do is think. There are no action moments in your life. You just think one thought after another, and you realizes as much as anything else, your life is one long continuous stream of thoughts. There is never a time when thought is not with you, flowing along in the stream of your life.

'You start to watch these thoughts. One comes and the other goes. Only one thought at a time. Our entire life is made up of a connection of thoughts. At some point, you realize a thought is just a thought. You will have many of them. It’s not going to spend a lot of time with you. When it’s there, it’s taken control over your life. Your entire focus is on it for the span of that thought, so it has value. It’s taking a little piece of your life away from you forever. It must bring value with the exchange. Something positive from my new perspective.

‘I figured out, all thoughts do not have positive value. While sitting in isolation, If I obsess over what Eldon might have planned for me, there’s nothing I can do about it during the moment. By focusing on it, I lose that period of productivity. It’ s very important to manage these periods of production. They make up your life, and the source to an internal energy. It’s where the sun touches down upon our souls. Where you can catch the rays of positive energy, or deplete your energies because of the overwhelming pressure you place on them. A thought is very important place to be.

‘The thing I recognized when I realized all thoughts come and go, is they can be switched to the positive when you catch them. It’s as easy as grabbing a negative thought and just throwing it away, because the moment you do, it’s replaced by a positive thought. Something proactive. If I’m depleting energy thinking about Eldon, the moment I catch myself, I remind myself, this is not the time and place for this thought, and there’s only room for one thought. What should that positive thought be?

‘It’s a very powerful thing to understand your thoughts, and know you can throw the bad ones away. You become very functional and proactive. You stop reflecting on those things which cannot be changed, and start looking for positive opportunities. It removes the distractions of life, and opens up a perpetual state of the here and now. The here and now is the only place where action can occur and you can create change. You’ve found the eternal energy of life. I’m very strong right now, Dawn. Stronger than I thought was possible’.